I met Frank Bruni a year or so ago, when, still the New York Times' restaurant critic, he came to Chicago on an eating trip and offered to meet somewhere for a drink. I suggested Sunda, a restaurant very much of the moment — too much so, it turned out, as the bar was packed, every possible chair apparently accounted for, and the polite hostess told us there was nothing she could do.

Anonymity has its drawbacks.

There's little chance that Bruni would be turned away from a dining room these days. Though he retired his critic's badge last year (he's still a Times reporter), Bruni's smiling face, on the jacket of his best-selling memoir, "Born Round," has made him more recognizable than ever.

But if the staff at Smith & Wollensky recognized us, lunching on the restaurant's canopy-shaded terrace overlooking the Chicago River, it didn't let on.

Bruni's book is more about his obsession with food and struggles with weight management than it is about reviewing some of the world's finest restaurants (he isn't offered the critic's job until page 268, at which point the book has fewer than 100 pages to go).

Nevertheless, the affable Bruni — fit and trim, at least 85 pounds removed from his bulked-up apogee — picked at his French dip and scarfed down exactly one french fry (which, I can attest, were quite good), while talking about reservations, costumes and life after criticism.

Q: Now that you're no longer a dining critic, do you find yourself looking at restaurants differently? Enjoying them differently?

A: I wish I still had the expense account, that's for sure. But that's interesting in and of itself because I never didn't factor in costs; I always thought, "How good is this vis-a-vis the price?" But I didn't factor in cost when deciding where to go.

As a consumer, I still spend more than the average bear because it's one of those things I love. But I completely see restaurants through a different lens, of "Is this the kind of bang for the buck I'm looking for, on my budget this week, having spent what I did last week?"

Q: What's the best part of being an ex-critic?

A: I didn't realize how much I missed being a regular. As a critic, you never get to be a regular anywhere because the imperative is to keep on changing, trying a new place or checking back on an old, but you're never making wholly volitional choices.

Yet, for most people in this world, the restaurants they're fondest of are the restaurants at which they're regulars. I enjoy being a regular, and as a regular I behave in an entirely different way. I'm a regular at some restaurants because I love two dishes, three dishes, maybe just one dish, and I get it over and over again. And it may be a restaurant that I would never have given more than one star because once you investigate the whole menu you find it's not that fabulous. But for a regular, if it does two things fabulously that are exactly the things you like to eat, it's a four-star experience.

Q: Do you find your no-longer-anonymous self being treated differently?

A: It's gotten better. Shortly after I stopped being a critic, I called Bar Boulud, and like most people making reservations, I say, "Hi, can you do anything for five people at 7:30?" And they said, "No, we could do it at 6 or maybe 9," and I said we'd make 9 o'clock work. And they said, "OK, name please." I give the name, and she pauses, and goes, "Oh, 7:30's fine."

To avoid that, I very often go through Open Table. They still see the name, but it avoids that moment when they try to give me something they wouldn't give somebody else. I don't want that to happen.

Q: One of the big surprises in the book is that your battle with weight gain began to turn around when you were posted to Rome as a correspondent, and solidified when you became a restaurant critic. These are career moves most people would assume to be catastrophic for weight management.

A: (Laughing) For some people, I think brinkmanship is the best strategy; there's a lot of truth to that.

My problem, whenever I'd get heavy, was that I was lying to myself. I'd say, "I'm going to pig out today because Tuesday I'm going to be super-virtuous." And I wasn't super-virtuous on Tuesday, so I'd think, well, the next two days. Since there was nothing in my life that rendered impossible going on a fast, or an extreme diet, I could tell myself all those lies.

But the restaurant critic thing, knowing I had to go out every day and eat a sizable amount of food, I couldn't allow myself those pigouts because there was no way I could rationalize that a pigout would have on its flip side some compensatory deprivation. There was no possibility of extreme deprivation, and for me, that kind of eliminated the extreme.